Mr Wong Gee’s Canton Restaurant, 1932 – Greek Street, Soho
Posted: November 11th, 2016 | 2 Comments »This picture popped up the other day on the Flashbak site. It’s Greek Street in London’s Soho in 1932. For China Rhyming readers the interesting bit is the sign of the left hand side that says Chinese Restaurant (no.51). This was the Canton Restaurant run by a Mr Wong Gee. It’s particularly interesting because the Canton was not a long lived restaurant, indeed it was out of business the following year and had only been in business a year or so – hence, there are few remembrances or photographs of the place compared to the far more famous and long-lived Shanghai Restaurant at the other end of the street by the junction with Manette Street.
However, because Mr Wong Gee was an interesting character it does get a nod in my recent article on London’s Chinese restaurant scene of the 1930s and war for The Cleaver Quarterly (an excellent magazine and well worth buying!!). We have one description of the place – the ground floor windows, “full of Chinese delicacies.†Due to debts on another restaurant on Charing Cross Road round the corner, the much larger Canton Café and Restaurant, he eventually left London and settled in Edinburgh (for the rest of his life) where he opened a Chinese-style cafe on Chambers Street and became a British citizen in 1950.
Please can you tell me more about Wong Gee since you say he was an interesting character. Do you know how old he was and if he had any family in the area?
WongGee appears to have been a rather chancey businessman. Not content with his enormous Charing Cross Road Café he had opened a small restaurant on Soho’s Greek Street, opposite the Shanghai Restaurant and obviously looking to compete, with the ground floor windows, “full of Chinese delicacies.” It didn’t last that long. He later moved north and opened a branch of the Canton Café in Edinburgh. it remained open into the 1950s at No.41Chambers Street, just off the South Bridge. Among the most popular dishes (all reportedly prepared by Wong Gee himself) were almond cakes, chicken pineapple and “Gumgrut” (apparently a small tangerine orange preserved in a syrup of fruit and ginger). Chinese lanterns hung from the walls and coloured hand-embroidered picture tapestries decorated the walls. Edinburgh obviously suited Wong Gee more than London and he became a naturalized British citizen in the city in 1950.